We have Republicans running on tax cuts they can't deliver on while Dems run on spending programs they can't pass.

"Romney's Upper HandBy Larry KudlowMarch 2, 2012 4:00 P.M.

Mitt Romney snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in Michigan by unveiling a pro-growth, 20 percent tax-cut plan and by resetting his limited-government spending cuts and entitlement reforms. In other words, he delivered an economic-growth package. It served him well.

It may not have been the only factor in his victory last week, but it put him squarely in the voter zeitgeist. And it may be apocryphal on Super Tuesday in Ohio, where he has come back to dead even after being down double digits.

Now, if former Senator Rick Santorum had stayed on economic message with his tax-cut plan, he would have swept Michigan. But he unnecessarily wandered off the reservation. Women serving in the military; JFK's church-and-state speech; the threat of ruling out contraception — by veering in these directions he completely undermined his economic message. And he lost because of it.

The most important issue for Michigan voters was the economy, which polled 55 percent, while budget deficits came in second with 24 percent. Romney held an 18 point lead in both categories. Abortion, a proxy for social issues, came in third at 18 percent. As a pro-life social conservative I'm not here to diss the social issues. But the economy remains issue number one.

Of course, there have been improvements in the economic numbers of late. And the mainstream-media pundits are ready to hand the general election to President Obama because of it. But they're way overboard on this game.

The public knows there's a debt bomb coming from Medicare, and that this debt bomb could lead to a huge tax-increase bomb. In fact, Ben Bernanke just warned Congress that the economy could hit "a massive fiscal cliff" by January 1, 2013, as the Bush tax cuts and the payroll tax cut expire. This could knock GDP growth down to 1 percent.

And even with the recent economic improvement, which is threatened by surging oil and retail gas prices, the economic recovery still ranks as one of the lowest on record. GDP growth averaged 2.5 annually over the past two and a half years. Compare that to the Reagan recovery average of 6 percent growth over the same period and a postwar average of 4.6 percent.

I'm not here to badmouth the improving economy. I'm glad of it. It shows the resilience of free-enterprise business. But I am here to question the new conventional belief that it hands the election to Mr. Obama. It's going to take more than that. It's going to take an economic program that can resonate — such as the revitalized Romney plan.

When former President George W. Bush cut taxes, he always talked about putting more money in people's pockets. That's a demand-side argument. But when Romney delivered his tax-policy speech at the Detroit Economic Club a week ago, he talked about after-tax incentives on the next dollar earned. And he correctly noted the incentive effect of allowing Americans to keep more of what they earn after-tax. This addressed a key question among conservatives: Does Romney get the incentive model of growth? The answer is yes. Romney's 20 percent tax cut brings him back to the Reagan supply side.

His tax-cut plan is not perfect. Instead of retaining all six income-tax brackets, he could have produced a modified flat tax of only two or three brackets, as Santorum has (though the candidates each feature top rates of 28 percent). But Romney also cuts the corporate tax to 25 percent, repeals the alternative minimum tax, abolishes the death tax, and ends the repatriation tax on the foreign earnings of U.S. companies that are brought back home.

It's not a perfect plan, but it's good. It avoids Santorum's industrial-targeting pitfall of a zero manufacturing tax. And it avoids Santorum's expensive tripling of the child tax deduction, which is social policy. When priced out correctly, it would block Santorum's reduced marginal tax rate.

Romney is also besting Santorum on entitlements. GOP budget meister Paul Ryan has praised Romney's entitlement reform for Medicare and Social Security, which would extend age eligibility and create a hybrid of free-market choice and benefit limits to the existing Medicare system. Romney has divulged details of an entitlement reform, whereas Santorum has not.

To be sure, there's more agreement than disagreement between Romney and Santorum on the fiscal issues. Both men are pro-growth. Both are talking about unleashing American technology for the energy revolution. And both own policy slates that are vast improvements over President Obama's big-government, tax-the-rich vision. Romney and Santorum oppose the entitlement state. And each favors the American tradition of opportunity and success.

So it really boils down to a matter of emphasis. My praise for Governor Romney is that he is capturing the economic spirit. My worry about Mr. Santorum is that he is not.

One day in the summer of 2010 I woke up to a commotion outside my door. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but it turned out that my neighbor, Jodie Evans, was having a fundraiser for her friend Jerry Brown, then running (successfully) for Governor. But there were protesters. Specifically, Andrew Breitbart, who was gliding around on rollerskates with a video camera, trying to catch Brown in the act of attending the party. I thought it was a little risky of Brown to go to Evans’ house–her Code Pink organization does some wild things. But what struck me most was the mood–the way the lefties in the party and Brietbart waved to each other. It turns out they knew him. He’d gone to the Brentwood School with some of them. “Everybody tells me he’s a good guy,” one of the aggrieved Brown funders later conceded.

David Frum could not have known Breitbart. At least that’s the most charitable reason I can think of for why he picked the occasion of Breitbart’s sudden death to promote the cheap, bogus meme that Andrew had a “giddy disdain for truth and fairness” as long as a story helped his side. ”Just as all is fair in a shooting war, so manipulation and deception are legitimate tools in a culture war,” writes Frum.

I’ve known right-wingers who were like that (‘See, we attack Kerry with this, and by the time he answers we’ve moved on to the next charge!’) Breitbart wasn’t one of them. Yes, he had a jaundiced view of the left, and a pugilistic–I might say, Frum-esque–view of the Middle East. But he said what he though was true, even when that hurt his side or put his own career at risk.

Exhibit A: At the height of “Weinergate,” the moment of Breitbart’s greatest triumph, he began to have doubts about the key source, one “Dan Wolfe,” who had caught Rep. Anthony Weiner’s off-color tweet. Instead of burying these doubts, Breitbart went public with them, something that threatened to badly complicate his side’s narrative. (“Is there a real ‘Dan Wolfe’ … or has someone for months elaborately pretended to be?”) He got a lot of grief from some conservatives for this.**

Exhibit B: Breitbart was a powerful speaker, and in the early days of the Tea Party he opened for Glenn Beck at rallies. But in his view the Tea Party was a success because it was a big tent focusing on cutting the size of government, not on social issues (where Breitbart, as pretty much of a ‘South Park Republican,’ often agreed with the left). Beck’s turn to vague religiosity annoyed him, and he said it. He knew this wasn’t going to get him in good with Beck, and it didn’t.

I would go so far as to say that Breitbart had an instinctive honesty–pretty much the opposite of what Frum charges. I don’t know the ins and outs of the Shirley Sherrod mess, in which Breitbart posted a video the end of which had been lopped off before he saw it. But I guarantee youBreitbart posted it because he felt it truthfully made a legit point (and he wasn’t aware what the rest of it would show). I also know that there were plenty of stories presented by the “cohort of young conservative journalists” that he refused to publish because he wasn’t certain they’d hold up. He didn’t pretend to have the institutional standards of, say, CBS and Dan Rather. But he had a commitment to truth, independent of ideology, that (as Frum notes) many on left and right lack.

P.S.: I first met Breitbart when he showed up at a panel I was on at UCLA. He told me he was the guy who posted items for Matt Drudge, and I immediately realized he was the most powerful person in the room. Nobody could understand why I was sucking up to the crazed hippie kid in shorts. Later, during the Gray Davis recall campaign, I published a suggestive item from a reader who said he had a Oui magazine article describing a gang bang Arnold Schwarzenegger said he’d once participated in. Breitbart immediately tipped off Smoking Gun, which sent a reporter to get the Oui issue and had the article up on the web in a matter or hours. It was later pointed out to Andrew that he could have gotten all the credit if he’d waited to get the Oui issue himself. But he didn’t want to get credit so much as to get the story and get it out quickly. (He did go out of his way to give me credit, though.) It wasn’t a pro-GOP story, of course.

P.P.S.: It hasn’t sunk in yet, only in part because I’ve been too annoyed at Frum to let it. I still mentally expect to see Andrew again. He’s always around. Nobody was too unimportant for him to argue with for hours. At the height of some controversy, in which he’d be betting his entire operation on the basis of his gut, I’d be stuck in a jam on the San Diego freeway and there he’d be in his Volvo SUV, stuck too, honking and waving while taking one of his four kids home from school. He was one of those people who had so much energy he seemed ubiquitous. Maybe there was more than one!

I thought we’d all wind up working for him. I didn’t realize until today how unhappy I’d be not to.

U.S. authorities are fighting a fire with gasoline, escalating concessions to a group that will only be satisfied with having the Americans turned over to a raging mob.

Continuing down this road may be far more counterproductive than the administration realizes. A reprimand, a court-martial, even a prison sentence for those who have been named as responsible will be seen as falling short and willfully further insulting the easily insulted.

In all likelihood, there will be calls for revenge for that, too. Pretexts for revenge are a renewable resource. "U.S. probe of Koran burning finds 5 troops responsible, officials say; Afghans demand trial," by Kevin Sieff for the Washington Post, March 2:

PUL-E-ALAM, Afghanistan — Military investigators have concluded that five U.S. service members were involved in the incineration of a pile of Korans in Afghanistan last week, according to U.S. military officials who have been briefed on the inquiry.

The burning of the Muslim holy books — which U.S. officials say was accidental — incited a week of protests that left 30 Afghans dead. The burnings also were cited as motivation for at least some of the six fatal attacks on U.S. military personnel that have occurred in Afghanistan in the past eight days.

Investigators appointed by Marine Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, found that the service members removed the Korans from a prison located at Bagram air base after they were discovered to contain extremist messages.

The books were then placed in an office for safekeeping, according to the inquiry. But they were mistaken for garbage and taken to a landfill on the base.

Afghan employees identified the books as Korans just as their pages caught fire, a major desecration according to Muslim teachings. The discovery led to a week of unprecedented tension between U.S. and Afghan military officials.

U.S. military officials said that although the five service members will be reprimanded, it is unlikely that their names will be released or that their punishment will approach the severity of what some Afghans are demanding, including trial in an Islamic court.

"For the soldiers, it will be serious — they could lose rank. But you're not going to see the kind of public trial that some here seem to want," said one U.S. military official.

Another military official said: "What they did was careless, but there was no ill will."

The much-discussed investigation was intended to quell unrest and prove to the Afghan public that U.S. officials were both apologetic and willing to make amends for wrongdoing.

But U.S. military officials expressed concern that the investigation's finding — which stops short of pinning blame on malevolent service members — might not satisfy Afghan leaders who have have publicly demanded harsh retribution. Senior Afghan clerics, in a statement issued after a meeting with President Hamid Karzai, said: "This evil action cannot be forgiven by apologizing. The perpetrators of the mentioned crime should be put on a public trial as soon as possible."...

If you were PM of Israel this Monday, would you be in a mood to take Obama's word for it

No, I admit I wouldn't.

Btw, I was back in Israel a couple months ago. Those I spoke to generally believe war is coming. And they seem amazingly calm and resigned about it.

In the end I think Obama will surprise (shock) most people and order a full-scale air assault on Iran, either jointly with Israel or following up after an Israeli first-strike. The irony of this will entertain historians for many decades to come.

>>>> We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too<<<<

I don't really believe that this is Karl Rove speaking. He can be a little arrogant, but he does not strike me as an idiot. And the statement is strikingly idiotic.